Plame Game

Scenes from the Wonderful World of W, Washington, WMDs and beyond ...

New York Times' executive editor Bill Keller has regrets over his handling of Judith Miller, the reporter who followed the White House and Pentagon line on Iraq's non-existent WMDs. He put out an astonishing memo to staff today, punctuated with many things he wished he could have, would have, should have done.

Aside from a number of occasions when I wish I had chosen my words more carefully, we’ve come up with a few points at which we wish we had made different decisions. These are instances, when viewed with the clarity of hindsight, where the mistakes carry lessons beyond the peculiar circumstances of this case.

I wish we had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as I became executive editor. At the time, we thought we had compelling reasons for kicking the issue down the road. The paper had just been through a major trauma, the Jayson Blair episode, and needed to regain its equilibrium. It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors. I was trying to get my arms around a huge new job, appoint my team, get the paper fully back to normal, and I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction.

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I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation, I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work. And under other circumstances it might have been fine to entrust the details -- the substance of the confidential interviews, the notes -- to lawyers who would be handling the case. But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells. Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn’t know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (In November of 2003 Phil Taubman tried to ascertain whether any of our correspondents had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper.

Nice he put this out late on a Friday before he takes off for a tour of the Asia bureaus.

Anyway, here's an excellent take on everything that went wrong at the Times, thanks to Miller being allowed to "run amok."

Meanwhile, Arianna Huffington, who has not let go of the outing of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame, which sparked this affair,  lays out how Plamegate might play out, if the Bushies get their way.

Meanwhile, the noose tightens around the administration's neck -- and, as the latter piece reveals, the office of U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, and the man himself, are obsessed with the media.

On one occasion, the office prohibited a reporter from travelling with Cheney aboard Air Force Two, because the vice-president's daughter said Cheney was unhappy with that newspaper's coverage.

Libby ''would see something had appeared in the newspaper or on television and wanted to use the White House operation to counter it,'' one former official said.

That the Cheneyites were tracking media coverage is no surprise to me. Read this  column of mine, if you have time for a laugh, from 2003.

You'd think that, what with the U.S. economy in tatters, a 9/11 commission that seems determined to uncover nothing about what happened that fateful day, war being waged on endless fronts (Afghanistan, drugs, Iraq, terrorism and, eventually, Iran and Syria) and who knows what else, the office of the world's second-most powerful person would have more important things on its to-do list than worry about three little words.

But no.

I know. Self-promotion. And I digress.

Speaking of 2003, this time in the context of the Plame scandal-- which is what this post is really about -- I am suddenly reminded of an attack on her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. It was his trip to Niger in search of evidence that Saddam had sought the fixings for a nuclear bomb that sparked this investigation. I can recall watching MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews while convicted Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, following the right-wing talking points du jour, repeatedly, maybe half a dozen times in five minutes, accused Wilson of doing no more investigating in Niger than sipping green tea with his diplomatic pals.

Ah memories, misty water-coloured memories of the way they were ...

And with this rambling post, I am calling it the end of a long, tough week.

Have a great weekend!

Saturday Night Jive

The big Toronto-based dailies gave major play to yesterday's announcement that the venerable Saturday Night is going ''on hiatus."  Here's the Star's front-page take. Here's what the Globe and Mail had to say. The Post's Robert Fulford, who used to edit SN, has his reminiscences here (sub. req'd.).

Most of the newspapers that published in 1887, when Saturday Night was founded, have expired. So have all the other weeklies and monthlies of that era. But Saturday Night, having lived through several generations of readers and writers, long ago established itself as the oldest continuing (more or less) title in the periodical press of Canada.

This history may be fairly well known, but how many of us are aware of the more remarkable fact that Saturday Night has also been declared dead more often than any other journal?

In the last 60 years, to my certain knowledge, the coroner has signed its death certificate three times -- and that's not counting the announcement yesterday by its owner, St. Joseph Media, that Saturday Night will suspend publication following the Winter 2005 issue, the one that appears in the National Post on Nov. 26.

Nobody is ready to write SN's obit yet, given that the mag has recovered from several near-death experiences in its 118-year history. Maybe it's denial, or wishful thinking. Or maybe, with some of the big media bucks out there (at Torstar, Rogers, or Bell Globemedia) and some vision, Saturday Night can be revived and revitalized into a rocking Canadian title.

Shallow grave

This promises to be interesting: The Dirt, a new blog promising the real lowdown on the Canadian media.

Are you like us? Desperate for Canadian media gossip but unable to bring yourself to pay the $120 for eFrank.ca or to read one more stinking word written by the Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias without considering the purchase of weaponry?

Consider The Dirt. We are very well-connected in Canadian media circles. We work at news organizations from coast to coast. We have seen and heard first-hand all the stories that are not fit to print on Ken Whyte, Jacob Richler, the Aspers, Russell Smith, Peter Mansbridge, Lloyd Robertson, Kirk LaPointe, Antonia herself, and the Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie of Canadian journalism, Rebecca Eckler and Leah McLaren. Or is it Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan ... errrr, no matter, you catch the drift. Mean girls with columns.

''We are'' this, and ''we are'' that. Whatever. ''We are'' anonymous. "We are" also lifting stuff from other sources, such as this story on Peter Kent in Maclean's and eFrank itself.

Still, welcome to the web-o-sphere. The more the funner.

UP YOURS DATE: If you have any dirt about me, please pass it along. My life has been kind of boring lately, what with work and those hospital visits back home. I could use the excitement. Air kiss!!

Credibility Gap

There's been quite a lot of media chatter this week about this report on Canadian journalism, sponsored by the Public Policy Forum, "an independent, not-for-profit organization aimed at improving the quality of government."

It's very cutely titled

Canadian Journalism. Pretty Good. Not Really. Ughhh. Better and Worse Than What the Yanks and Brits Get. It Sure Could Use a Lot More of This, Much Less of That. Can It Be Saved? Hell No. Then Again . . . Maybe.

Author/editor Dan Turner constructed his report via a ''virtual roundtable,'' as if his interview subjects, a sterling list of mostly Ottawa-based journalists, bureaucrats and academics, were sitting around in the same room shooting the breeze about the state of the news media today. Whether it's an editing trick or the magic of email, they appear to be responding directly to one another in real time.

When they're not.

Which kind of reinforces the notion that you can't really believe what you read or see, doesn't it?

Imagine if a TV documentary did this. Instead of depicting the participants talking to the camera, the director made them appear, perhaps through computer trickery, to be sitting around a table together when they're not. That's outright fakery.

The panel is also remarkable for its lack of diversity. As Kirk LaPointe, managing editor of the Vancouver Sun, emphasized in an email that circulated among journalists:

1. No one was interviewed outside Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto (except, in Andrew's McIntosh's case, Sacramento).
2. No one was interviewed in the country's largest newspaper chain, CanWest.
3. No one was interviewed in private broadcasting.
4. No one was interviewed in a managerial or executive position.
5. No one was interviewed who is under the age of 35, maybe 40.
6. No one was interviewed in new media.

Still, there's some worthy content in the 24-page report. For example, here are the Star's Ottawa bureau chief Susan Delacourt and the Globe and Mail's Ottawa columnist, Jeffrey Simpson:

DELACOURT: It’s true that in this multiple-deadline, all-news universe we’re turning our journalists into packagers. I get crazy when my fellow reporters only want to write about who said what in the daily circus. Maybe it is because there is so much happening on any given day, so much back-and-forth by BlackBerries and email, that it’s all a reporter can do is simply gather it all up and throw it back at the viewers or readers at the end of the day. I find the TV news reports now looking more like a video diary of a reporter’s day, heavy on performance and theatre, rather than anything that sheds light on facts and information. It’s ass-covering, and it’s lazy. As are most of the so-called attempts to connect with “ordinary people,” which usually involves sticking a microphone in front of citizens and allowing them to broadcast any old thing they happen to feel like saying – even if the reporter knows it’s dead wrong. I was just about tearing my hair out watching all those cross-country bus tours and town halls last election campaign, and seeing seasoned journalists acting as little more than microphone stands. The Canadian public deserves more than having uninformed neighbours spout nonsense at them. You can get that over the back fence. The Canadian public deserves journalists who will individually ferret out stories, journalists who have been given the time and resources and the confidence to break away from the scene and introduce something new to the discussion – something that will force the performers into a whole new play the next day.

SIMPSON: We just don’t do explanatory journalism any more, the way we used to. There’s been a very substantial decline. I think that there’s been a shift in two important respects over the past 15 or 20 years, both of which have come at the expense of the media providing usable information for the public. First, there’s been a significant shift from "eyewitness" journalism to "I witness" journalism. Journalists now write a great deal about themselves, and since most journalists aren’t very interesting, the copy isn’t very interesting and doesn’t do much to help the public understand the issues.

But journalists and critics have been complaining of these problems for years. Nothing changes. In fact, they're getting worse, thanks to budget cuts, more demanding deadlines because of 24/7 news channels and web sites and, yes, even blogging.

Me, I can hardly wait for Canada's first real Blog-o-election. While last year's vote did see many non-pros blog away, all the attention was on the few mainstream reporters -- the National Post's Andrew Coyne, the Star's David Olive and Maclean's Paul Wells to name three -- typing away.

But next election? Stand back! It's gonna be a veritable eruption of what-I-ate-on-the-Harper-bus-between-Timmins-and-Thunder Bay blogorrhea from the mainstream.

UPPITY DATE: Report author Dan Turner emails:

Charley Gordon was with CanWest when I interviewed him.

Don Martin was invited to participate twice. He twice agreed by e-mail (I'll send you the last one if you like, where he thanks me for reminding him and promises to get on board) but then disappeared.

I recognized the usefulness of having some younger people involved. I invited three of them. None took me up on it.

As for Kirk, I didn't invite him. Sorry Kirk.

Looks like Kirk joined the party anyway.

The piece I wish I had written

Ken Alexander, editor and publisher of The Walrus, and a one-time producer of CBC Newsworld's now-defunct debate show counterSpin, offers a brilliant analysis of what's wrong at the top of CBC. He zeroes in on the recent eight-week lockout of 5,500 employees and an op-ed penned by CBC president Robert Rabinovitch during the labour dispute.

Whether at Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, or the CBC, the job of a president or ceo is to be the corporation's primary advocate, to create fealty among staff to a vision, and to turn that vision into reality. After identifying the central issue —lack of funding—Rabinovitch's piece trails off, the apparent burdens of the day superseding the imperative of reinforcing the clarion call: like Canadians who support a mixed economy, who believe, for instance, in government intervention in the health-care marketplace, the cbc cleaves to two fundamental objectives: to knit the country together by appealing to citizens' highest inclinations, and to be an authoritative check and balance on a heavily concentrated private media.

Instead, making his first category mistake, Rabinovitch argues that the cbc must compete with private media, and, essentially, to do so on terms dictated by the marketplace. Wrong. The cbc's mandate is to transport viewers and listeners out of prosaic reportage on people and things, and into the world of ideas, into issues contextualized through documentary programming. Those of us with memories are not always amused by, or sanguine about, the "just in time" world, and as private media in Canada becomes increasingly dominated by the celebrity-du-jour profile, what shoes to buy, and tawdry gossip about those in power, some of us will pay dearly for depth and safe but challenging mental havens.

The tools of private media include short-term contract employment and the hiring of specialists, and, like a lapdog in need of stroking, Rabinovitch demands the same. Efficiency means the hiring of specialists for a special series on health care, followed by the hiring of replacement parts for a special series on Internet blogs. And so it must be. Herein lies Rabinovitch's second mistake. In fact, what the CBC needs are enlightened generalists and the in-house mentoring capacity to create more of them. A nimble and curious mind will jump from health care to blogs, an eclectic thinker can enter most all conversations. The universities are waking up to this fact, and are pushing a multidisciplinary approach to learning. They are realizing that a person can be straitjacketed by specialization, that the health-care expert who never reads a novel is rendered dull at dinner parties.

Read the whole thing. Then look around the rest of the Walrus site.

Mrs. Caesar where are you?

Has Peter Kent hired a publicist?

After making it into the New York Times (reg. req'd.) on Monday, Global's deputy news editor gets even more play for his run as a federal Conservative MP in the Toronto riding of St. Paul's, and his claims that the Canadian media are biased against the Tories. This time the coverage is in Maclean's.

Kent's snap transition from reporter to critic has helped put his campaign in the spotlight. When the 62-year-old declared in May, it was a made-for-TV moment. "I'm as mad as hell!" he told the cameras, quoting the fed-up anchorman-turned-crusader Howard Beale in the Hollywood classic Network. (Perhaps not the wisest cinematic reference, since the film tracks Beale's descent into lunacy.) A few weeks later, he challenged journalism schools to monitor the coverage of the coming election for anti-Tory bias. Skewed reporting is a day-to-day reality, says Kent, pointing the finger at the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail and CBC. "It's the focus on trivial or confected issues that can be made to resonate by effective communicators," he says earnestly. (Kent still works for Global, but no longer has a hand in the news.)

Kent recently said that he is limited to ''backshop management duties'' - what? does he sweep up? build the sets? change the light bulbs? - and nothing more. Still, he does carry that ''news editor'' title.

Interesting isn't it how he can accuse  other organizations of slanting the news  but does not point out his own conflict of interest. For example, if he were working at CBC, his favourite target, he'd have to stick to its very strict policy.

No employee who is employed by the Corporation on a full-time basis as a producer, a supervisor of news or information programming, an editor, a journalist, a reporter, an on-air personality, or who is a designated management employee or primarily responsible to represent the Corporation in its contact with the public, may, subject to subparagraph 14(3)(b) or (c), take a position publicly in a referendum or plebiscite, actively support a political party or candidate, stand for nomination as a candidate and/or be a candidate for election to the House of Commons, a provincial legislature, the Yukon legislative assembly, the legislative assembly of the Northwest Territories, or a municipal or civic office.

Another preferred punching bag in Kent's bias battle is the Star. So here are some excerpts from our staff policy, which is not online:

It is not proper for newspaper people to be both actors and critics. If we are to discharge our editorial responsibility, we must be free to comment on the activities of any publicly elected body or special-interest organization. We could not do this without an apparent conflict of interest if a member of the editorial staff were also an active member.

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1. No member of the editorial department should hold any elected political office, work as an official on any political campaign, or write speeches for any political party or official...

2. Care should be exercised to avoid open endorsement of any political candidate or cause, since this might reflect on the integrity of the newspaper and employee.

Hmmm. And what might Global's policy on such matters be? I am not trying to deprive Kent of a paycheque. I'm just saying.

One less staffer

Global News managing editor Neal Kelly, a 17-year vet of the network, went out the door last Friday.

Not only was he responsible for the Ontario newscast, but also Focus Ontario, his first love from his days as Queen's Park producer. Word is that Global mucky-mucks wanted to bounce him back to Queen's Park. Kelly said no and took a buyout.

Regina news director Les Staff - that's his name, not a lay-off notice to Globalheads - has been tapped to replace Kelly next month.

Good News and Bad News

From my not-so-secret internal memos file, a 3,886 word missive from Globe and Mail editor Edward Greenspon about the paper's "Reimagination'' process. It launches a total group rethink of the paper, from its tone to its online presence, in a changing competitive environment.
 
I'll spare you most of it because it's just too long and too, well, predictable. But this part, near the top, offers a fascinating glimpse into how editors view you, the reader:

When the current editorial management team was installed in July 2002, we took a look at the various ways our readers interact with the paper. We settled on four categories:

a) the reader as citizen

b) the reader as economic player (investor, manager, etc.)

c) the reader as leisure user or consumer

d) the reader as individual or family member

Organizing our thoughts in this way led us to several conclusions. First, the core functions of The Globe could be found in a) and b), both of which we do well. But we were not as strong on c) and d) and, oddly, our readers seemed to be spending a lot of their time on c) and d). Just think about dinner parties you attend: how much conversation is spent talking abou ballistic missile defense and how much is spent discussing the movie you just saw, the book you read, anxiety about your kids' school or your parents' health etc.

I would have added e), the reader as eyeballs for advertisers. But then editorial types like to keep a firewall between church and state.

Anyway, once you get past all that a) b) c) and d) stuff, a picture emerges, one not unique to the Globe or, indeed, any major paper today. Editors are scrambling to reorder the old way of triaging the news.

A decade ago, the big political stories commanded the best play while the so-called lifestyle or entertainment piece would get bounced back to the ''women's'' pages. Now that's changed. This is why you'll find front-page stories today on, say, the winner of Canadian Idol or the latest version of Viagra while seemingly more important news is relegated to the inside.

To many people, this is the ''dumbing down'' of news. But is it? If the stories are all still in the paper, and receive adequate coverage, does it matter where they are placed? Unlike TV, when the dreck often displaces the significant report, there's room for lots more in a newspaper, even if it's in digest form.

Besides, in our daily lives, what's more important, connubial bliss (the male potency pill story) or what Stephen Harper said about Paul Martin?

The danger lies in editors who lose sight of the overall public interest, democratic discourse and the common weal. These should be the most critical concerns of a free press not whether Tom knocked up Katie and with which brand of turkey baster.

Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye CBC)

Veteran CBCer Mary Lou Finlay is hanging up her microphone at As It Happens. Today came word that she's retiring at the end of next month. It's totally her decision, say insiders close to her. Here are some excerpts from the note to staff from CBC Radio veep Jane Chalmers:

In making this decision, Mary Lou said: “It’s just the right time for me, even though it will be hard to leave. I’ve never loved a job more.” She added: “As It Happens is a great program. The people I work with are smart, funny and committed, and so is our audience. But hosting this show demands a huge amount of energy. At this stage of my life, I need to make more room for other projects I’m interested in.”

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It’s important to recognize that this is not a goodbye, but rather a farewell. The door is open for Mary Lou to contribute to CBC Radio programming down the road, and we all hope that we will hear her familiar voice on CBC once again.

As this profile from last summer's Ryerson Review of Journalism states, Finlay and CBC

have broken up and made up more times than she can recount. Still, she "couldn't imagine leaving." Then again, you never know.

Indeed.

You can bet we'll be hearing Finlay's smoky voice again.

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Antonia